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TeleSym, Inc. announced that its SymPhone System software for voice calling on wireless networks has been selected for campus-wide use at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. The announcement coincides with the opening of the college's conference titled Unleashed: The Summit on Wireless and Mobile Computing.

SymPhone adds cordless-phone capability to mobile computers. Under the Dartmouth contract, TeleSym will be supporting thousands of users on one of the world's largest wireless IP telephony installations, expected to eventually serve a community of 13,000 students, faculty and staff.

Dartmouth has been the scene of many 'firsts' in organizational computing, as the first Ivy League institution to be fully wired, then fully wireless. By year-end, it will also be the first college to fully deploy voice-over-IP (VoIP) on its wireless networks.

After a year of testing, Dartmouth began its migration to Internet calling last month, by distributing the telephone software to incoming students. The first SymPhone product being distributed runs on Pocket PC-based personal data assistants (PDAs). TeleSym is completing user (client) software for the Palm and Apple Macintosh operating systems, also to be provided under this contract.

Call quality makes the difference

"The outstanding voice quality provided by SymPhone sold us," explains Bob Johnson, director of network services at Dartmouth. "When you call from computer to computer, the quality can be indistinguishable from wired phones and noticeably better than cell phones."

"That quality is protected by features built into the SymPhone software," Johnson notes. "This will pay off as we add users. SymPhone accommodates the packet loss and latency of the wireless network, without adjustments to the network quality-of-service settings."

"Dartmouth is the ideal place for SymPhone use," agrees Raju Gulabani, CEO and chairman of TeleSym. "The campus community is pioneering new applications on one of the largest, most heavily used wireless networks. This will showcase the cost savings and productivity increases that occur by deploying SymPhone voice on Wi-Fi networks."

Patent-pending features in SymPhone provide breakthrough sound quality that surpasses earlier-generation soft phone software. When calling between SymPhones across the open Internet and Wi-Fi LANs, the fidelity is near-CD quality, with no perceived latency (delay). As Network Computing magazine put it, ... "normal sound for the SymPhone is nothing short of spectacular; it approaches CD quality."